Top Ten Rings

10. Ring House 4

If you’re into laws and making people give you secret-ish information, Ring House 4 is the place to go. It sounds like the name of a solitary confinement unit of a prison, or maybe even an execution block, but the house is really just a normal little brick house west of the Biological Sciences building. You can go there to exercise your God-given right to “FOIP,” or view documents under the “Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.” There are “spreadsheets” that you, citizen, are free to access, but only if you know how to blindly navigate the bureaucratic labyrinth known as “www.ualberta.ca.” Even then, you’re probably fucked because of the volatile nature of “webpages.” Ring House 4 is the gateway to oblivion where you might be able to find elusive “documents.”

9. The old “Ring Pop Proposal” joke

This joke is so bad it’s good. I’m pretty sure most people see it for the first time in elementary school playgrounds, but it lives on. Which I think is miraculous because I’m not even sure if they sell Ring Pops anymore, you’d think they would have banned them by now for choking hazards or something. Anyway, it had been a while since I last saw a rendition of the joke and I thought maybe it’s over, maybe no one will make another farce of the sacred union of marriage again. But then I went to Deadpool a couple weeks ago and there it was! The quirky and charismatic protagonist pulled the Ring Pop out of his nethers to propose to his predictably one-dimensional romantic interest. Here I was thinking I saw the end of the joke. Nope.

8. Hourly bell ringing

As someone who lives near the Legislature, I benefit from the time-telling service of the bells. It’s great when I’m watching TV and my phone is charging in the other room and my laptop is closed on the couch beside me. I’ll be watching The Godfather or something and I’m at the part where most of the family bails on Al Pacino who’s left alone to guard the hospitalized Godfather. I’m starting to wonder what time it is because fuck this movie is long. Then the bells start to chime. Four times. That means it’s four p.m. Cool, now I don’t have to move.

7. Ringo Starr

Ringo was a Beatles guy who played the drums and now he’s more of a last-minute late-night-show guest that you call in because Eddie Redmayne cancelled. Most millennials can only distinguish between Ringo and Bono because one wears grey sunglasses and the other wears red sunglasses. That being said, Ringo was in a pretty alright band so I’m going to give him seventh place. I liked “The Long and Winding Road.”

6. Green ring of life

This is probably the best indicator of a cohesive social unit.

So it’s a Friday night and you and a few friends show up at Kalyb’s house. None of you really know what to do so everybody descends into the basement and sits on the furniture that’s a little too beat-up for the living room. In the middle of a sports conversation, Trent over there busts open a bag of Doritos and every nostril in that five-metre radius flares to let in the aroma of salty carbs. Everyone likes and consumes the Doritos, except Brock — what the fuck Brock. Anyway, Jace is the only one who isn’t uplifted by Dorito ingestion probably because that girl he wanted to ask out on a second date ghosted his three text messages today (he keeps checking his iPhone 6 worriedly).

It’s okay though because Kalyb just opened the mini-fridge to reveal a 12-pack of Mountain Dew. Green cans pop and hiss in masculine disunity, and Colton makes a joke about something that happened when they were all in high school. Everyone laughs, but the joke is only funny because Colton said it. Brock’s Mountain Dew fizzed and spilled over a bit when he opened it and he’s trying to make it look less obvious but it’s pretty obvious.

At this point Trent goes over to the seasoned Xbox 360 and fires the thing up. Colton grabs the newest controller — the plastic is black and the buttons all function nicely. Kalyb and Trent grab their respective controllers. Jace says he’ll sit this game out and refreshes his Facebook messenger (nope, no red message bubble, sorry Jace). Brock was in the bathroom this whole time, so he has to use the shitty controller that was left with a dysfunctional B button after a Mountain Dew spill last January.

The Xbox menu reveals that NHL® 13 Stanley Cup Edition is in the disc tray, and everyone is cool with that. The four green lights illuminate as everyone presses their start buttons. As the two custom teams on-screen face off, you look around and realize that this is as good as it gets.

This is your man crew.

5. Jupiter’s rings

Everyone forgets about Jupiter’s rings because Saturn kind of dominates that race. And yeah, Saturn is clearly cooler in the most general sense of astronomical objects, but Jupiter isn’t that bad either. Jupiter actually has four rings. The main ring is about 6500km wide — more wide than Canada, but less wide than Russia. They’re made of mostly dust because Jupiter has some moons that are close enough to the planet that they’re slowly being torn apart by massive gravitational forces. Those moons are grinding into dust just from being in the vicinity of a planetary mass you couldn’t begin to imagine. It’s crazy. Anyway, that dust turns into Jupiter’s rings.

4. Pringles

I’m not a fan of the taste, but at least Pringles are space-efficient. The potato-per-volume ratio is pretty good when you cram a column of chips into a narrow tube. If there were any chips that will make sense for storing away in case of emergency, my first choice would be Pringles because you could cram a bunch of tubes in a uniform pattern to maximize storage usage. Cool. If you have a bunker, do what I just said because storing 48 litres of air just because you didn’t want to let go of Old Dutch is unreasonable. The best thing to do right now is get used to tubed foods so you don’t have some kind of culture shock when the economy stops having room for luxury bagged air.

3. Dying Oklahoman cockfighting rings

Oklahoma was one of the last states to outlaw cockfighting back in 2002, but you can be damn sure they’re still at it. The locals give the classic “don’t infringe on my religious rights,” “Genesis 1:26: God has given man dominion over the animals” etc. etc. excuse because animal rights are really just a symbolic gesture with no true rationale. The fighters assemble in garages and Facebook groups that are simultaneously “underground” and public. And really, who should be deciding on what’s wrong and what’s right when it comes to performance animals? The police/judge/some law guy or the chicken farmer who labours every day to strengthen these animals from when they hatch until they’re torn apart a year later by another chicken in Michael’s garage? Cockfighters care. They look out for their chickens and for each other, evidenced by this post in their Facebook group: “Maryland cocker just got two years in prison. They are coming down hard. Be careful out there.” On the surface, the Oklahoman cockfighters are just exercising their right to dominion over animals, but what they’re really doing is building a community of facilitated Darwinism and, more importantly, compassion.

2. The geological Ring of Fire

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It7107ELQvY

There are a bunch of volcanoes around the Pacific Ocean that do a lot of shit-disturbing because the earth’s crust is always sliding around everywhere. The whole thing is called the Ring of Fire. In Canada it’s not that big of a problem because we pretty much only have to worry about British Columbia. There’s not much destruction in recent memory, but around the year 1700 there was a major volcanic eruption in northern BC. According to Nisga’a oral histories, the eruption killed around 2,000 people and levelled two villages — that’s huge. You can check out the place today and see just how far the effects reached. You can spend hours driving through these plains of giant lava boulders, some of which are 12 metres tall. Some are the size of your car.

1. Dial-up ring

Hearing the distorted dial-tone transports me back to a world of low-resolution monitors and beige plastic casing. I vaguely remember feeling constantly frustrated. Thankfully, I was not an adult who required an email for work purposes so having slow internet wasn’t the end of the world. I had MS Paint and the spray-paint tool. Presently I could never find the dial-up ring’s sound soothing because of its deep negative connotations. I can see it ending up as a white noise track. Go back and listen to it, and you’ll find it’s like the echo of an old god trying to remind you of the chaotic fun you had in a young cult.